I had returned from a once-in-a-lifetime trip Down Under in tiptop shape, nicely tanned and relaxed from the Cook Islands and more than ready to tackle my many projects afresh. After all, the writing of at least nine books awaited me, from ten to ninety per cent complete. Let the postponed year 2015 begin!

Granted, the old body had seemed less willing to get up to ten thousand steps a day than in the past. Might as well talk to the doc about that, I decided, once home again. She and I had probably forgotten what the other looked like by now, given the frequency of my visits. Dr. S checked the records: sure enough, it had been ten months. In the cause of good sense, at my age, we might…

A bottle of wine winked at me;
said, “You need me today.
I am from California.
I have an edge and I am on sale.”
I choose to believe its slick green surface;
cradled it “home” with a companion or two
and stacked them all, willy-nilly, in the fridge.
The realtor arrived.
The friend came.
Since they inhabited only one body,
I offered a glass of green glassy wine,
a libation to stories with an edge.
Somewhere between glasses two and three,
a buxom idea joined us; crossed her legs,
seated ever more easily on the third chair.
Clouds lifted; skies sang in azure;
sweet summer shade crept across the patio.
We all smiled:
future and heaven
edged
hesitantly
closer.

This lovely building,
with its pool and hot-tub, gym and workshop,
pub and crafts room, gardens and fountain,
woods and salmon stream,
Skytrain and City Hall,
arts center, college,
miles of shopping and doctors,
police and politics,
schools and churches, all a mere block away or
even ensconced in the building,
security and all—oh!
How I loathe this lovely building!

The rhodos bloom uptight against their fence,
afraid to drop petal or leaf in the paths
of the masked men gunning away all signs of rot
with black noise drawn from Earth’s sleazy past.
Inside their plastic suits they are safe from thought.
Likely their headphones keep them in step,
block out the beeps and drones and roars
of the whitewashed, whirling dirt-dervish machines,
the phalanx of Progress just behind them.
Inside, the hallways crouch, sibilant as declawed cats—
no wonder the small dogs trot nervously, afraid to sniff
or whine; say anything that might spell d-o-g.
The pools, pockets of liquid poison, lie mostly undisturbed
below their posted rules, graceless , grammarless laws
against most kinds of human behavior.
No one speaks.

But somewhere in the world, even here,
it’s a glorious, sunny day.
I’ll sit on the balcony with tea and a book;
ignore the noise.
Run a finger down the table, cleaned yesterday,
to be sure it’s clean enough.
Black as ink.

My ancient apple tree,
who likely refers to me
as her latest human,
somewhat less elderly than she,
has a sense of humor:
Wherever I have swept,
she drops a small green bomb
or shrugs off a bit of the moss
infesting her trunk, which turns
as gray as foot fungus
the minute it hits the concrete.
“Be nice to me,” I growl,
“and I’ll spray you with that elixir
once again, that stuff that took
twenty years off you, last summer.”
But I don’t mind her meddling
with my morning meditation,
the broom a choir of straw
sussurating over stones.
Broom-making may be a dying art,
for this one announced its imminent demise
after a single season.
At least it’s not plastic:
I can cut up the corpse,
let it contribute its final essence
to the warmth of my winter house.
We may survive.
For now, it sings, soft as any broom,
and in the same human key.
My back yard sounds like Indonesia,
feels like Guatemala,
might be Ecuador,
or anywhere swept clean
of human folly,
anywhere people care
about civilization.

“Is anybody using this chair?”
she asks, slim smooth hand
already grasping the thing
by the scruff of its neck.

Of course I am using that chair
at this table for two,
crowded against a friendly wall.
That chair supports
both past and future—
only the present sits empty.
Tony, for one, is due,
my fellow birthday-holder,
the man whose cellphone
remembered to invite me.

This intimate table’s surrounded
by forty sky-happy people I don’t know,
chattering, clattering friends in a future
I may not ever enter.

Have you watched old men or women
converse in a corner
with companions only they can see?
“We save our adulation,” I tell Spence,
“for writers whose characters stay mute—
talk to me later.”
He hands me the leash; kisses my cheek;
signals Grey Dawn to lie at my feet
and heads out the door to tomorrow.
A veil of smoke curls ‘round us both
as Tony slips into the empty seat,
the chair that nobody was using.
His phone lies embedded in hand or in groin—
I can’t tell which—re-telling his life
like a jaded journalist.
Our vaporous talk barely parts the clouds
and his glass disappears
faster than smoke.
I pay; then pace home,
Grey Dawn beside me,
nudging my knees.
“Every birthday,” I tell him,
“every birthday,
I occupy more chairs.”

Receiving somebody’s blog on the nature of direct action, I seem to hear the megaliths of destiny moving around to better positions. I’ve long said that ordinary courage requires witnessing and, for some, telling what was seen. As I contemplate the writing of Pale Criminal, the final book in The Falling Sky Trilogy, the mind keeps straying to drastic actions certain characters might take to deal once and for all with the psychopathy stalking their lives. Naturally. Suddenly I get it: the three stages of ordinary courage needed for the conquest of evil are witnessing, articulation and direct action.

The third level may be required of us if we are to stop idiocy like the Enbridge pipeline. Frightening idea. I realize anew how much I enjoy being alive. How much it takes to risk one’s only life for a cause.

White Birds: dreams for dancers traces the stages of courage symbolically. At first, the victim of abuse is barely even a witness: she becomes disembodied before the abusive act is fully perpetrated on her. In the second, third and fourth dreams, she moves from seeing her disembodiment to recounting her story; from telling the tale to daring to change her form. In the final dream, she moves from shape-shifting to taking the direct action that ends the evil. A warrior may not always be successful in eliminating evil, she learns, but the roles of victims and accommodator are surely insufficient.

In Broken Sleep, chronologically the first book in The Falling Sky Trilogy, Paul and Zack, reluctantly shaken out of the comfort zones of their professions, become witnesses to Jane’s story. Zack, the son of Holocaust survivors, can do no more than witness. Paul, son of a successful survivor of the Greek underground, takes action with compassion. Matt, to appearances the all-round American star of the American Dream, takes action as he sees fit — for your own good, of course. As for Jane, just as no one knows precisely what happened to her father as a POW, neither her friends nor we the readers find it easy to predict what she can or will do.

La Chiripa is all about articulation, the telling of lies that encourage the ongoing evil, and the courage it takes to tell the truth. In Guatemala, that courage is only beginning to break through what is called “El Silencio”, the silence that rules after 42 years of CIA-sponsored violence. The wonder of PIra is that somehow, in spite of — or perhaps because of — her mother’s victimization, the child is fearlessly articulate. That is why readers love her as she carries “La Violencia”, the bigger half of the book. That is also why readers love to hate Matt as he carries “El Silencio”, for in his fearless telling of his actions there is no love, no compassion, no right but his own. He’s his own private CIA, over and over again.

You see, the bad guys will always take action until their evils can stand futile. “All that is necessary for evil to take over the world is for enough good men to do nothing” — or something close to that. We must be alert to the moment when the ordinary courage of witnessing and truth-telling is no longer enough. To the hour of direct action.

Is it any wonder that the prospect of writing Pale Criminal scares the hell out of me?